Progressive Labor Party on Race & Racism

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to destroy capitalism and the dictatorship of the capitalist class. We organize workers, soldiers and youth into a revolutionary movement for communism.

Only the dictatorship of the working class — communism — can provide a lasting solution to the disaster that is today’s world for billions of people. This cannot be done through electoral politics, but requires a revolutionary movement and a mass Red Army led by PLP.

Worldwide capitalism, in its relentless drive for profit, inevitably leads to war, fascism, poverty, disease, starvation and environmental destruction. The capitalist class, through its state power — governments, armies, police, schools and culture — maintains a dictatorship over the world’s workers. The capitalist dictatorship supports, and is supported by, the anti-working-class ideologies of racism, sexism, nationalism, individualism and religion.

While the bosses and their mouthpieces claim “communism is dead,” capitalism is the real failure for billions worldwide. Capitalism returned to Russia and China because socialism retained many aspects of the profit system, like wages and privileges. Russia and China did not establish communism.

Communism means working collectively to build a worker-run society. We will abolish work for wages, money and profits. Everyone will share in society’s benefits and burdens.

Communism means abolishing racism and the concept of “race.” Capitalism uses racism to super-exploit black, Latino, Asian and indigenous workers, and to divide the entire working class.

Communism means abolishing the special oppression of women — sexism — and divisive gender roles created by the class society.

Communism means abolishing nations and nationalism. One international working class, one world, one Party.

Communism means that the minds of millions of workers must become free from religion’s false promises, unscientific thinking and poisonous ideology. Communism will triumph when the masses of workers can use the science of dialectical materialism to understand, analyze and change the world to meet their needs and aspirations.

Communism means the Party leads every aspect of society. For this to work, millions of workers — eventually everyone — must become communist organizers. Join Us!

Donald Trump’s openly racist presidential campaign is just the latest example of how the capitalist ruling class uses elections to sustain its dictatorship over the working class. From Haiti and Egypt to the United States, competing factions of millionaires and billionaires are sorting out which group will hold state power—and which will be disciplined and suppressed. In addition, the rulers need elections to keep workers tied to the myth that the profit system can be reformed to meet our needs. In the process, these bosses divide the international working class with appeals to racism, sexism, and nationalism. They use stooges like Trump to scapegoat immigrants for mass poverty, unemployment, and the perpetual economic crises caused by the profit system. Capitalism can never serve the working class! The Progressive Labor Party is fighting back in more than two dozen countries to smash the capitalist class and their electoral farces. Only communist revolution can create a world where workers have a real say over the crucial issues that affect them. Only a communist society—run by and for the working class—can end the nightmare of imperialist war and the mass slaughter of immigrants. Every politician serves one faction of capitalists or another. In the U.S., the heart of global imperialism, the fight between capitalist factions is heating up. Enter Donald Trump.A Racist Servant of ExxonMobilWhile Bernie Sanders attempts to win over liberal reformists who are disillusioned with eight years of Barack Obama’s empty promises, Trump is busy rallying a different segment of the working class. This group has a deep hatred and distrust of the U.S. federal government, and is vulnerable to being swayed by Trump’s crudely racist and sexist attacks. An the New Yorker magazine (8/31/15) noted, “Ever since the Tea Party’s peak, in 2010, and its fade, citizens on the American far right—Patriot militias, border vigilantes, white supremacists—have searched for a standard-bearer, and now they’d found him.” But Trump’s greater danger is that he is hardly the renegade outsider he purports to be. His multi-billion-dollar fortune derives from the dominant, finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class. These bosses, represented by ExxonMobil, Morgan Chase, and mouthpieces like the New York Times, are scrambling to protect their obscene profits in an escalating competition with their imperialist rivals, notably China and Russia. Trump’s “rogue” candidacy has been intensively publicized by the Times. His proposals are both criminally racist and wildly impractical—to deport all 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S., or erect a wall along the entire U.S./Mexican border, or eliminate birthright citizenship. Even so, Trump’s rants could help legitimize more moderate-sounding—but equally racist—Republicans like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. They could also galvanize frightened liberals into rallying around an imperialist war-maker like Hillary Clinton. Currently, the chief dispute among U.S. bosses centers around imperialism. On one side stand the biggest finance capitalists and industrialists, who need to hold on to the Middle East’s energy riches by force. Clinton, Bush, Rubio, Sanders, and Joe Biden all front for this wing, as does Trump. As the Times pointed out (9/1/05), Trump and Bush “are the only leading Republican candidates who have not signed a pledge not to raise taxes.” More specifically, Trump is threatening to raise taxes on greedy hedge fund managers and to close overseas tax loopholes for U.S. corporations—measures that will be needed to fund the broader global war to come.On the other side are the more domestically oriented bosses, led by Charles and David Koch, who have less to gain from current and projected U.S. wars—or from the corporate taxes required to pay for them. The Koch brothers plan to raise nearly a billion dollars for the 2016 elections, and are still searching for the right candidate to represent them. Americans for Prosperity, a Koch front group, excluded Trump from its recent “Defending the American Dream” summit because his candidacy originates from the main imperialist camp:

Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House….Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party (Washington Post, 8/5/15).

According to Bloomberg News, a major Wall Street news service:

Failing to win the nomination won’t make Trump electorally irrelevant….His chance of winning the presidency [as an independent] would be poor, but his chances of splitting the conservative vote and helping a Democrat get elected would be good (Bloomberg, 8/24/15).

Even Trump is open about his allegiance to the main U.S. imperialists!

Donald Trump wants to “knock the hell out of” Iraq’s oil fields in order to strike ISIS. And then he wants to take over the oil fields and funnel the profits back to the United States…. [H]e would then send in Exxon or another oil company to quickly rebuild the infrastructure once the conflict is over (CNN, 8/18/15).

Workers’ True Enemy: ImperialismBy his own words, Trump adhere to the Carter Doctrine, the imperialist stance codified by former President Jimmy Carter in 1979: that any threat to U.S. oil interests in the Middle East would be met with a military response. Followed by every U.S. president since, this policy has cost millions of working class lives. In another token of imperialist loyalty, Trump floated the name of Jack Welch, ex-CEO of the huge military contractor General Electric, as a potential Treasury secretary. It was war-maker GE, through its NBC subsidiary, that catapulted Trump to national fame by running his TV show, “The Apprentice,” for 14 seasons. The self-styled “independently wealthy” Trump has also offered the Treasury post to his real source of cash, hedge fund billionaire and imperialist tool Carl Icahn. In 2014, a single bond issue left Icahn Enterprises LP in $3.5 billion of debt to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley (Bloomberg, 1/6/14). Icahn bankrolls many of the hideous building projects with the “Trump” name plastered over their entrance.Don’t Be a Sucker for the BossesWorkers must not be fooled into falling for Trump’s racist filth. At the same time, it would be a mistake to dismiss his clownish behavior as a circus sideshow. In appearance, capitalist elections in every country are always something of a circus. But it is through them that the bosses conduct their deadly serious business.PLP organizes workers, students and soldiers worldwide under the slogan, “Don’t Vote, Revolt!” The international working class doesn’t need phony elections or professional politicians to build the world we need. PLP is building an international revolutionary communist movement of millions that will smash all racist borders, smash anti-immigrant and sexist attacks on our sisters and brothers, and smash capitalism once and for all. Join us!

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Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?The radio says they are just deportees.Deportees, by Woody Guthrie, 1948

Capitalists love to point to voting as the height of human achievement. Whenever the bosses ruling the European Union and the United States launch an invasion, they justify their slaughter for profit by claiming they are “spreading democracy.”Today, the international working class is facing a crisis. Millions of our class sisters and brothers have been displaced by imperialist wars, imperialist-backed civil wars, or capitalist economic crises. Because capitalism deprives workers of real choices, thousands of them brave dangerous journeys to the EU and U.S. in the hope of finding work and surviving. Nearly every day there is another tragic story of immigrating workers killed by this murderous system.Throughout the world, capitalists are using this crisis to drum up working-class support for more racism and more imperialist war. France’s neo-Nazi National Front, U.S. presidential candidates like Donald Trump, and fake leftist Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro are just a few of the bosses seeking to intensify lethal anti-immigrant racism. In Sweden, where the neo-Nazi party recently polled 25 percent of the electorate, the fascists have proposed a series of laws to prevent desperate immigrants from entering.Of course, capitalism grants no “right to vote” to millions of immigrant workers worldwide on whether they want to be stuffed into tiny ships, cross hot deserts or suffer abuse from human traffickers. Communism means workers’ power, no racist borders, and no workers forced from their homes and families to find work. Voting strengthens the dictatorship of capitalism by giving workers the illusion of participation while following the capitalists’ laws. Smashing capitalism for good means building a mass international PLP and a mass Red Army for armed revolution. The road to revolution will break a lot of capitalist laws. As we continue on that path, we must struggle with workers to break with the dangerous notion that voting under capitalism can bring communism any closer.